10 THE INSULATION OF ST. MICHAEL'S MOUNT. 
takes exception to his recognition of the Mount as the Iktis of 
Diodorus, and to his acceptance of the charters just spoken of: 
stating that “the Charter of Edward the Confessor referred to in 
p. 343 is quite impossible, and, if there be degrees in impossibility, 
those quoted in p. 339 are more impossible still. In them Bishop 
Leofric and Queen Matilda are made to sign charters some years 
after their deaths, and Leofric is made to act by authority of 
Gregory the Seventh, who did not become Pope until after Leofric 
was dead.”* The question of the Mount and the Iktis will be 
noticed in the sequel. 
The passages in Professor Max Miiller’s paper which have 
decided me to write once more on the subject, are the follow-— 
ing :—Having referred to the notices of the submerged forest in 
Mount’s Bay, by Borlase in 1757, Carew in 1602, and Leland 
(misprinted Lelant) in 1533-40, and having pointed out that the 
first “tells us that these forest trees were not found round the 
Mount, but midway between the piers of St. Michael’s Mount and 
Penzance, that is to say, about one mile distant from the Mount,”+ 
he thus proceeds:—“It is quite possible that the remains of 
trunks of trees may still be found on the very isthmus between 
the Mount and the mainland; but it is, to say the least, curious 
that, even in the absence of such stringent evidence, geologists 
should feel so confident that the Mount once stood on the main- 
land, and that exactly the same persuasion should have been 
shared by people long before the name of geology was known. 
There is a powerful spell in popular traditions, against which even 
men of science are not always proof, and it is just possible that if 
the tradition of the ‘hoar rock in the wood’ had not existed, no 
attempts would have been made to explain the causes that severed 
St. Michael’s Mount from the mainland.” 
Again: “The only question which, in conclusion, I should like 
to address to geologists, is this. As geologists are obliged to leave 
it doubtful whether the insulation of St. Michael’s Mount was 
due to the washing of the sea-shore, or to a general subsidence of 
the country, may it not have been due to neither of these causes, 
* Sat. Rev., Jan. 14, 1871, p. 56. 
f p. 334. 
t p. 335. 
